


Faces

by SweetAvidyaJones



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: F/M, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Suicidal Thoughts, Trans!Kuruk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-30
Updated: 2016-11-30
Packaged: 2018-09-03 05:00:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8697829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SweetAvidyaJones/pseuds/SweetAvidyaJones
Summary: Dealing with Spirits is often costly. Kuruk should know.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is pretty dark. Apologies in advance.

He thought they understood. 

He was given the best training. The most respected Master in the tribe taught him how to fight, how to wield water like a deadly extension of his body. 

His surprise when he was told he was the Avatar was nothing compared to theirs. 

“We thought you knew,“ they said. "Why did you think you were allowed to learn to fight? Why did you think you weren’t sent to the healing hut with the other girls?" 

 x 

"Call me Kuruk,” he begged his parents. 

They indulged him, though his relatives didn’t understand it. The tribe elders refused to use his chosen name. They used his name like a club, trying to beat him into a hole in the ice that he didn’t fit into. 

"It’s a phase,” he heard his mother tell one of his older cousins. “It will pass.”

He hoped it would pass. 

 x 

He starved himself. 

His body paid the price for its mutiny against him. It was the only way he could think of to control the curves shaping his frame. He wilted and felt weak, covered himself in layers of clothing and heavy furs. 

He was seventeen and ready to die when he wandered out onto the ice, away from the village. They had not sent him away for training yet. There were excuses, from his teachers, from his parents. The elders offered no explanations, just frozen silence. He knew he was an embarrassment to them and hated them for it, and himself. 

He went to the Spirit Oasis and sat by the pond, watched Tui and La in their endless dance. For a while it soothed him. Then it made him lonely. 

He thought about them as he walked away from the lights of the fires behind him, into the darkness of the night. It was cold and he was delirious. When he collapsed face down in the snow, he felt warm and drowsy. He did not open his eyes for what felt like moments but could have been hours. When he did, he was in the Spirit World and he was not alone. 

She was called the Mother of Faces, she told him, and she knew about him, from Tui and La. 

"I can help you,” she said. “But you may pay a price for it later." 

"I don’t care,” he replied.

“You _should_ care,” was her grave response. “The Avatar must be more wary of spirits than most." 

When he awoke, he pressed his hands to his new face. He stood and returned home. His parents were frightened and confused but knew his voice, and recognized the scars on his arms. They fed him, because he was ravenous, and once he was in bed they left to speak to the elders. 

He had never slept so well. 

 x 

He went South for the New Moon Festival and didn’t tell them who he was. He had not been to the South for more than two years, and was different then. This time, he was a stranger to them, and they welcomed him into the fire circle. 

The elders knew. They watched him with suspicious eyes, from the edges of the light, and he tried to ignore them. Girls asked him to dance. He laughed with people his own age, his people. They were kind to him. 

Whispers followed him eventually, as ever, and people began to keep their distance. It was the same as always. Except for Ummi. She was his age and unmarried, and he wondered why because she was pretty, with a shy smile. He tried to push her away, because she was sweet and didn’t deserve to have unkind things said about her. But she persisted. People thought her strange, she told him, because she could talk to spirits. She was a talented healer, so they let her be. 

They walked together and talked. She asked him questions. Never intrusive ones. She asked about the North, about his training, about firebending, which fascinated her. When it became clear she was not going away, he snapped at her, in desperation. 

"This isn’t the face I was born with." 

"I know,” she replied. “Everyone knows." 

The first time they kissed was fleeting and gentle, and he felt like his heart would burst. 

"I’m not what you want,” he warned her. 

“What is it you think I want?” she replied. 

He could not answer this without denying himself, so he said nothing.

His fingers trembled the first time he put them on her bare skin. He ached to lay naked against her, but he didn’t. She was disappointed by his distance - he could feel it in her touch, the way she clutched at him, begging with her hands - but she didn’t say anything. 

She moaned his name in the darkness and it was like surfacing from underwater. He had been waiting for her, for this ragged gasp of air. For someone to truly see him, finally. She whispered that she loved him and he believed it. 

 x 

“You have to eat,” his mother said. “She wouldn’t want you to do this to yourself.” Then, “You’re going to die if you go on this way.” And finally, “I’ve already lost my daughter. I don’t want to lose my son, too." 

It was the first time she had called him her son and it broke his heart, wrung it out and left him empty. For so long, it was all he ever wanted. Now it was meaningless. 

"Koh is vindictive,” the Fire Sages told him. “Even if you could find her, she can never be restored to who she was." 

They looked into his eyes when they said these things, as if he would agree with them. As if he could. As if he thought her face made her who she was. 

He searched for her. Every year. He braved the darkest corners of the spirit world, guided by desperation and the old legends he heard in the months between. 

He watched Tui and La in the pond, at the Spirit Oasis. He looked at his reflection in the water. It was flat and empty.

**Author's Note:**

> In AtLA, the Spirit Oasis is in the Capitol of the Northern Water Tribe. I can't remember if I read somewhere that the Capitol was built around it or if I just made up a HC about it. But for some reason I had the idea of it being outside of Kuruk's village, like a day's journey.


End file.
